Recently, various types of hand held electronic devices for personal data organization have been successfully marketed. One such type of device is a personal digital assistant (PDA) sold under the trademarks PalmPilot and Palm III, available from Palm Computing of Mountain View, Calif. This PDA 2 includes control buttons 3 and a touch sensitive screen 4 with touch sensitive screen activation areas 5 displayed thereon, as illustrated in FIG. 1. A separate hand-held stylus is typically included to activate the touch sensitive screen activation areas 5, which are on-screen controls that are bit mapped areas on a touch sensitive screen that when touched, they implement predetermined changes in computer activity. PDA's typically display phone numbers, to-do lists, calendars, digitally stored maps, directions, etc., which are accessible through touching the activation areas 5 and/or control buttons 3.
One problem with such hand-held devices is that it takes both hands to operate. One hand is used to hold the device, while the other hand manipulates the stylus and/or control buttons. Many times, both hands are not available to hold the PDA, pull out the hand-held stylus, and operate the screen activation areas.
Another problem with hand held PDA devices is that the size of the screen activation areas can be small and therefore difficult to operate with the stylus, especially if only one of the user's hands is available. For example, the display can show a personal phone list where the user needs to touch the stylus on the individual displayed names to retrieve information. However, when the displayed names are small, it can be difficult to touch the screen activation areas for the individual names using a hand-held stylus.
There is a need for a device to make operation of PDA's more convenient, especially with only a single hand. Further, there is a need for a more convenient method of precisely touching selected activation areas on a PDA touch sensitive screen.